You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

My guest today has seen his integrity questioned and his work ridiculed by senior officials in Moscow,

Damascus, Riyadh, and other centres of power.

And that's quite an achievement for a self-confessed computer nerd from the English Midlands,

armed with nothing more than an internet connection and a curious mind.

It was the violence that followed the so-called Arab Spring, which prompted Elliot Higgins

to begin his painstaking online research into claims being made by those in power. His blog, written

from his bedroom, was called Brown Moses. By 2014, it evolved into a website called Bellingcat, which used open-source online

investigation techniques to publish a series of scoops. Bellingcat exposed the depth of Russian

military involvement in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine. It revealed the real identities of two key

Russian suspects in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Scripal. And most recently, it's provided

damning detail about the Russian suspected assassin of a Chechen rebel in Berlin. There's a common

theme here, of course. Belinkat has repeatedly embarrassed

Vladimir Putin's Russia. But Moscow isn't their only target. Its supporters say Belinkat has reinvented

journalism for the post-truth age, but can open-source investigation really separate fact from fiction? Well, Elliot Higgins

joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Hi. I want to start, if I may, with a self-definition.

Would you describe yourself as a journalist or a data analyst or some sort of online detective.

I like online detective. We do, I think you could say, acts of journalism in some of the work we're doing.

But really the way we work with Bellingcat uses open source investigation on a whole range of topics that go beyond journalism.

So I find it very difficult to define what we

actually do beyond just saying we do investigations. Do you have to be a specialist in terms of

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